ON THE ROAD TO RECOVERY…by Sporran

Saturday

Yesterday, I jumped to the top of a closet, chased the dust bunnies that live up there, then leapt down and scampered away.The bipeds were impressed that I didn’t limp. (Bipeds are easily amused and impressed.)

Here, I demonstrate my flexibility, using the broken leg to scratch. See that mop? Well, it annoyed me, so I attacked it. I won!

It can get pretty noisy around here, what with those stupid dogs next door and children yelling. But the other night, we heard a different noise. Lots of popping and loud bangs.Man! Our ears were twitchin’ fierce. Dinah grabbed her camera and ran outside.

For this???

Apparently, it’s called fireworks and there was rather a lot of it, down at the beach. We thought it was hardly worth the bother!

Dinah says I can finish this later;she wants to go somewhere to look at paintings…

Monday

Well, Sporran has wandered off so I might as well add my bit.

Spent an enjoyable day yesterday, cruising around in my air-conditioned car with a friend and taking in some near-local art shows.

One was a little less “local” than intended – we took a wrong turn and had to drive a fair distance up the steep range before I found somewhere to turn ’round. Oh well…it was an interesting “extra!”

OK…all you folks in the Arctic zone might want to skip this…

You’ll notice I highlighted  the bit about my air-conditioned car? Well, believe me, if I did not have that facility I would not have ventured out yesterday. The official reading was 31 deg Celsius, but inland (where we were) it must have been several degrees higher. And with a seering northerly. Have I mentioned that I do not like high temperatures?

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This tangle of vines on a palm in front of the living room obscures my view of…

…this. Cassia fistula

Ahh! But when all those buds open … The poor tree is somewhat misshapen as the huge Royal Palm fronds  “lean” on its branches when they drop. And at around 15 to 20 feet from the ground and weighing a lot more than moi…moi is not inclined to scramble up a wobbly ladder to remove them.

This Adenium obesum rewarded me with flowers this year, after sulking last year when something with BIG CLUMSY FEET flattened it.

Locals call it “Desert Rose.” Another case of confusing common nomenclature as I know Desert Roses as that crystal structure you find in…well, in deserts.

This is a web picture of a Saharan “desert rose.”

Actually, that’s gypsum and if my shaky third form chemistry holds up, I think it’s something like this: Ca SO4 2H2O. But wiki might be more accurate!

My white one has sisters in red and pink.

UPDATE 24 hours later… the flowers were stripped by the hot, fierce wind that has not abated for 3 days… don’t even ask what this did to the lettuces!

I still have those dust bunnies to deal with…

THE DEVIL DRIVES PRADO

And, by extension, that means I’m living in Hell. It certainly feels that way at times. Especially when I have to share the roads with the mums in 4×4 chariots. I believe these lethal brutes are known, in London, as “Chelsea Tractors.” Across the ditch, New Zealanders call them “Remuera Bitch Boxes.”

And there are certain times and days when, if you are smart (or have a choice) you stay OFF the roads. Unfortunately, on three mornings I do not have that choice.

Well, I suppose I could leave home super-early and then twiddle my thumbs til classes begin…

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This is probably the closest I’ll get to apple blossom in this climate…

Cassia javanica

I have to make sure these are hooked up clear of the car before I reverse

Passion fruit; looks like a “bumper” crop this year.

^^^^^^^^^

And because I sometimes have dangerously silly moments ( Kite surfing may be one of them…)I’m inclined to agree to things that, perhaps, I shouldn’t.

I know some of you follow Andrea Joseph’s blog so if you do you’ll know that, starting November 3, she did a series of sketches of an old school desk.

And this is where the dangerously silly moment occurred. See, I thought to myself: “Gosh! Drawing a crappy old school desk can’t be beyond me.”

Now, I am more what you’d call a scribbler than an artist. That’s scribbler, as in child -with- crayon. Definitely NOT an artist. Not like Andrea Joseph. Oh, no! So what the bejeezlehoop made me do this? Worse – what made me tell Andrea Jospeh I intended to draw my desk! (And she, bless her little pencil shavings, has held me to it!)

So, taking a deep breath, here is an old school desk. From memory. Not all the marks on it were made be me but, 50 years on, I’m probably safe from detention if I admit to  one or two.

Actually, our desks were remarkably free of  graffiti; we wrote and drew all over our exercise books, but most of us were too timid to carve love hearts on desks. And, anyway, the relationships that, on Friday were “for life” were often forgotten by Monday!

Next time I’m tempted to emulate  someone I hope one of you will smack me, upside the head!

THE CATABLOGUE HAS BEEN RECLAIMED!

Back in the workaday world after drinking in (and drinking, in!) the glorious Spring sights and sounds of Auckland…

Yes, I did take some pictures. And, yes, I will inflict them share them with you.

Beyond this thicket of acacias, eucalypts and bladey grass is the log cabin we called home for almost 20 years…

I used to work here, as vineyard worker and gardener… the main house with part of the vineyard…

...and here… the winery and restaurant and more vines.

We stopped overnight near Brisbane to visit an old friend and, just for laughs, he drove us back to the village where we all lived til a few years ago. They say “never go back” and I have no desire to, but it was fun to see how things have changed, if only to strengthen the resolve never to return!

The gardens, once the showpiece of the winery, appear to have been ripped out. Granted, it’s still early Spring, but what has become of all the roses? I still bear scars from the annual pruning of some venerable “Albertine” and “Milkmaid”  and “Dorothy Perkins” and many other pricklies. No sign of them now, so ,presumably, their woodland underplantings will also have been ripped out…

So…an evening of talking, laughing, eating, drinking, reminiscing, eating, drinking…and then an early trip to the airport.

About halfway up the motorway, one of those lightbulb billboards flashed: accident 2kms ahead. right lane closed Oh, great! And there is no way to get off this damn’ road! So we slowed to near-snail -speed and by the time we got to the supposed accident, all was clear.Not a sign of broken glass, crumpled fenders, ambulances. Nada! I think they just like to scare the bejeezlehoop out of people en route to the airport!

Most of our trip was to do with family stuff. No, really, it’s not interesting blog material!

I had hoped to catch up again with blogger friend Denise, but between meetings (me) and workmen(her) we were not able to connect. Next time, eh, Denise? And we did not go South this time so that’s another reason to look at the 2009 calendar!

But the Fujica got a work-out!

It’s been a long time since I saw cherry blossom, but this trip made up for it! The flowering cherry lines just about every street in the suburb where we stayed.

Magnolia, almost at the end of its season…

And it would not be an Auckland Spring without kowhai

or tui...

Clicking the link will take you to Wikipedia’s much better photo (personally, I reckon theirs is stuffed ‘cos these birds are incredibly acrobatic when feeding; I think it might have to be “tripod time” if I want to get decent shots!) Despite The Man’s mother having kowhai in both front and back gardens, with tui reeling drunkenly from one to the other, I finally took this picture several streets away. Heard them, too, on this trip.

I went “a bit mad” with the Toon pictures…

Toona sinensis; hundreds of Aucklanders have these in their gardens, but it’s only now, in their Spring pink foliage that they are noticed.

Let’s take a little break from gardens…

This is a picture of a 1973 Mustang Mach 1.

It is also a picture of The Man, who bought it in Toronto, drove it to Vancouver (oh, c’mon, you don’t need a geography lesson!), shipped it to Auckland and drove it there for 5 years before selling it to a friend. This friend still drives it every day.

And if you still want gardens, look at the lovely broad beans against the fence!

Another bright garden…

On a trip further North, to visit a friend at Warkworth, we had a day out seeing various sights

Female Paradise Duck at Tawharanui Reserve….            and here with her mate

This reserve has an electronic gate, part of the pest-eradication programme, at the entrance. Once inside, you are free to get out of your car.We did, braving the cutting wind and threatening showers.

Part of an interesting enamel information board…

Looking towards (I think)  Kawau Island . Or maybe Little Barrier Island. I should know, as I’ve sailed over to Kawau more than once!

Never mind the multi-layered tropical tourist – just look at that beautiful crab apple!

This is the entrance to  famous Morris and James Pottery at Matakana,  an hour or so North of Auckland. Apart from some lovely ceramics, their small cafe has an oh-so-scrumptious menu!

We “hit the ground, running” on our return, with The Man back to work on Monday and me back to school on Tuesday. Then, of course, there was the Big Shopping Trip to the supermarket, the tangle of stuff in the garden, the mail to sort through. What? Back-read all the blogs? Surely, you jest! I’ve managed to get around some of you and will try to catch up as I go. Better than that I cannot possibly promise. Especially as I have added swimming to my programme!

Yep! I finally got back into the pool yesterday, after too long on land. I never was fast or stylish in the water and am now very “rusty” so it’ll take  a while before I have any hope of racing my friend on our weekly dips. But I’m sure the exercise will do wonders for my creaking shoulder. Coupled with regular elbow-bending, I could be a force to reckon with. At the pub, at least!

Before I go…I had an email from our sculptor friend telling me I had mis- credited him with the steel sculpture in his garden. These striking birds are, in fact, from Zimbabwe. Sorry, I don’t know who made them, but thanks, Adriaan, for pointing it out.

THE POWER OF MEMORY AND FRAGRANCE.

Our memories have a magnetic, hypnotic pull that can transport us across a lifetime of miles. If we’re going to be all scientific and clinical about it, we can simply say it’s the way our brains store and use important knowledge. We need to remember where to find food, remember what it should smell or taste like, remember the sneaky bas fellow who might want to get to it first!

Or, stepping away from the clinical analysis, we can be romantic about this. A multi-million dollar perfume industry is!

A good friend of mine has been anosmic for a long as she can remember. To me, this would be like losing my sight or hearing! Imagine not knowing the scent of fresh raspberries. Or roses. Or spring grass after rain. OK, when the wind is blowing from the glue factory or you’re on a rush-hour tram with the great unwashed, maybe more of a blessing!

But I have only to catch the lightest scent of freesias

wafting through a window and I am back to the first freesias I planted, when I was three years old.

Of course, freesias are not happy in tropical climes and, although I did sometimes have some success in the Brisbane area, they were short-lived and not as fragrant as I remember.

Another problem is that people seem to want coloured flowers with long, straight stems and while growers have obliged it has often been at the expense of fragrance. Sod that! I’ll take the short, twisty stems of the old-fashioned cream F.burtonii !

I don’t have any freesias here . But I am learning to appreciate  tropical treasures. Some, for their fabulous and flamboyant flowers, others for fruit.

Here’s one

:

Now, in its unripe state, it’s the colour of a Granny Smith apple.

A black sapote, not really a sapote but Diospyros digyna, sometimes called “chocolate pudding tree.” 

Sunday…I Googled and found this recipe. I’ve never made this so can’t tell you what it’s like, but if anyone with a Sapote would like to give it a whirl, feel free to come back and tell us!

Google

See full-size image. www.tropicalfruitworld.com.au/uploads/recipes… 250 x 235 – 19k

Myrciaria cauliflora, the Brazilian joboticaba, flowers (and fruits) directly on the trunk and branches.

Here’s a close-up…                                                                               

This is in a friend’s garden. Perhaps, if we can beat the bats, birds and possums, we’ll eat the fruit!

From the road (at 80kmh!), this looks like pink blossom.

A closer inspection reveals …

Fruit! Ah, but what fruit? Looking like one of the many native plants that have similar berries, the only reliable way to tell (at this early stage, anyway) is to split one with a thumbnail. Fig!  One of the wild figs that spring up all over the place, courtesy of birds and bats. The long pointy pink bits are new leaves. An enormous tree until recently, it is now Y shaped since the electricity board chain sawed its middle out to keep it clear of power lines. Ugly? Yes, but not so long ago the whole tree would have been hacked down and burned. Perhaps the message is getting through…

This is a Calliandra. Prettty enough, but a lot of gardeners hate the “sludgy” remains of the flowers.

Sick of trees? Want some street art? This way, folks!

A mosaic “bombie.” * Part of a community project to jazz-up an inner city precinct. This, designed to look like part of the Reef, is a casual seat at the Wood/Victoria Streets intersection.

Old posts, like a pier, make another seating area. On Sundays, this street is closed to vehicular traffic and hosts an art market, with street performers, musicians, all sorts of funky hand made artifacts.

A plaque with some information.

Mosaic fish, suffering from years of pedestrians!

A cute lil bronze crocodile! The bronze inlays seem to hold up somewhat better than the mosaics.

A dugong. There are all manner of reef images, some mosaic, some bronze, some painted in vibrant colours on the power poles. I think I’ve loaded you with quite enough for one post. Maybe I’ll show some more another day. Already too much? Well, be tidy folk and put what you don’t want in the very smart, up-to-the-minute  purple rubbish bins.

I’m off to have forty winks otherwise I might fall asleep at the exhibition opening!

*The dictionary gives this definition: an unexploded small bomb, or bomblet, of the kind littering much of SE Asia after recent wars.

HOW WE COPE WHEN DEADLINES HAVE US BY THE THROAT

We may decry modern inventions and innovations as taking us down the slippery slope to Hell. And, sure, there are many hi-tech things out there that I am not interested in. Can’t be bothered texting messages to find out if my boyfriend is cheating. Don’t want a pair of sneakers with flashing Zodiac signs. Sat-Nav would drive me bonkers.

But if we can load crocks into an automatic dishwasher

or programme the oven to cook that casserole
while we’re picking up the kids and taking the dog to the vet

and returning library books

and re-stocking la cave

… doesn’t that give us a slice more time for other things?

Take blogging. My posts are less frequent than I had hoped. It’s not that I’m losing interest and momentum so much as running out of that precious commodity TIME.

So I dips me lid to the geeky folk who gave us links.

Binary code handbag: It comes with a message in Binary in the front. This is a sure success with the IT people, all you need to do is to gift it to someone whom you don’t like & do remember who has no idea what binary is.

Don’t you just love that “gift it to someone” line!

That’s on Crooked Brains’ site. Here’s another gem: http://www.crookedbrains.net/2008/05/architecture.html

And here is a link to some of those weird plants I promised. www.ubcbotanicalgarden.org/potd/2006/11/nepen…

Sadly, not mine as something “got to” mine. Some insect exacting a just revenge, probably!

But for more pictures and facts on these bizarre beauties, go to Google Images and enter “Saracenia.”

And, like me, be glad the geeks gave us links.

More of dinahmow’s photos

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Post script…I don’t have an automatic dishwasher.

FOR THOSE WHO WANTED MORE GARDENS

UPDATE ON TACCA
As there have been a few enquiries on the growing of this plant, here are a few tips.

First: this is a tropical beauty so don’t just “shove it in the ground” if you live in Adelaide or Edmonton. In most parts of the world it’s considered a “pot plant” and probably needs a heated greenhouse in harsh winters.

But it should be “do-able” if you treat it well.

Probably the important points to note are soil conditions: must be free-draining and temperature: summer 25 – 29deg Celsius (75 – 85deg Fahrenheit) and winter
15 – 18deg Celsius( 60 – 65deg Fahrenheit).

Seed is available commercially from several places, but germination is sometimes tricky, so seek a good nursery and buy an established plant. Growth is late spring through summer (yeah, I know, here we are almost in winter and my silly thing is throwing flowers!), when it needs to be kept moist so you might need to use a mist spray.If you don’t have a heated greenhouse you could bring it indoors, but if you favour central heating, keep a close eye on Batty!

And while we’re at it, Google “images, bat plants” and drool over that GORGEOUS white-flowered one.

As Mr. S. says: I hope that this helps.

And some more botanical Latin for Vicus!

If Carl Linnaeus
Could only see us,
In our struggle tyrannical
With nomenclature botanical…
He’d have written his damn’ list in English!

Most of you seem to like the gardens in this part of the world, although I admit that not all my photos are taken in my own garden!

But this morning, once the sun had taken the bitter chill off the morning (yes, 12 deg Celsius IS bitter at 6am when you live in a wide-open house, so please don’t flood me with horror stories of the frost heaves on the Manitoba highway or the skatable ice on your ponds in Alberta or the demise of your goldfish in Galway, ok?) I wandered about with the camera. Nothing much in the “spectacular” line at present, this being our slow season, but one or two treats for you:

Let’s begin with “name this plant.”
I mentioned this one recently…let’s see just who was paying attention and who was carving hearts on the desk.

Not the best- focussed picture! These are the velvety buds of the Michelia figo (Port wine magnolia) at the back gate. A very heady perfume when in flower;some folks say it’s like over-ripe bananas!

Aeschynanthus; the flowers appear at the end of very long stems so it needs to be hung from head-clearance height. This one is over on the pergola, well clear of anyone bigger than a dwarf. Actually, even dwarves (or dwarfs) might have to stoop to get by. This was getting too big for its pot so I ripped out some of it and poked it (no finesse!) into another hanging basket from which it, too, causes traffic delays. I expect, any day day now, to be visited by the SPHOSP…*

Tecomanthe hillii, the Fraser Island creeper. A bit of a misnomer, I think, since this beauty certainly doesn’t “creep” her way through gardens, up trees, over fences. Pruning and training is an ongoing chore. Why do I bother with it? Because it’s pretty!

Here are some of the buds (they form along the stems)…
And here’s the tearaway, heading for the top of a 20′ tree.No, I will NOT be climbing up there to prune it!
For those who might want to know, the flower bells are reminiscent of foxgloves.

Lest you think I grow nothing but pretty pink flowers…
Some of the tarragon (yellow flowers) and curry plant (Helichrysum italicum) that have fought back against the invasion of the Banana Barons. This area, formerly a raised vegetable patch, is ear-marked for the chooks. Well, it’s now too shady in winter and too hot in summer for leafy vegetables so they are tucked in here and there whenever I find or create space.

Tacca chantrierei, the Bat Plant. This one is mine, showing new (if somewhat scrotal!) flower buds. (And see those bright green seedlings in the pot? They are **%&$#!! palm seedlings.I do not want them! I am forever yanking the wretched things out. A bit like painting the Forth Bridge…)

And this is a picture from the web.

And now, I think I’ve given you enough to be envious of.

I may be away for a while, but I’ll still be visiting, so keep that coffee pot hot. Or the wine chilled.

*Society for the Prevention of Humiliation Of Small Persons

More of dinahmow’s photos

And the answer to name this plant..
I noticed this flower bud this morning on the Blue Butterfly I mentioned a couple of posts ago. If it does flower, I’ll certainly show you. Depends how much colder the weather gets!